Restructured my url format - now they're all PR0

[ptoma]

I went ahead and changed my url format about 2 months ago. I noticed that the urls are now showing a pagerank of 0. My homepage still has a rank of 4 but nearly all internal pages have a rank of 0.

Is it possible they have not been assigned a pagerank? I was under the impression it would be a "greyed" out ranking instead.

There is at least one internal page that has a rank of 0, yet ranks #4 for its keyword, so I'm confused.

[tedster]

Real time PR, the kind that Google uses behind the scenes to calculate their search results, is never displayed on the toolbar. That visible toolbar PR is only exported to the toolbar about four times a year, and even then it's like a historical "time capsule". So, what you describe is exactly what I would expect for a URL that was newly introduced since the last toolbar PR export.

The common understanding of Page Rank that you can pick up around the web is almost always off just a bit, and sometimes it's off in very important ways. There's some very helpful information around the forum here, starting with the thread that's in our Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] thread, pinned to the top of this forum's index page.

Google PR - PageRank FAQs [webmasterworld.com]

[pbaddock]

Also, aside from Google's undisplayed PR (ie page rank allocated before the next toolbar update is propagated), if you change your URL's and don't do a 301 redirect to the new page locations from the old ones - you WILL lose your PR (disclosed & undisclosed) - so ensuring you redirect your old page locations / url's to the new url's is important to try to feed thru the old PR. As tedster suggests, much of this is covered in other posts - but I thought I'd pop this comment in for your ease of reference. Tedster - pls correct me if this is not accurate in any way.

A related question - while a site gains trust / ranking through age related factors - does this apply equally to individual page url locations? ie will the shift to the new url structure "reset the counter" on each individual page - do individual pages carry age/trust factors?

[tedster]

pbaddock, what you say sounds correct to me - but I will add that this transfer of PR through a 301 redirect is not immediate and in some cases seems to take a long time. Also, PR never seems to make it through a chain of redirects, only through one simple step.

My own preference when changing urls is to use a light touch on 301s - studying the site's logs and backlinks and then only placing a 301 redirect on the key legacy urls. So the 301 only goes to urls with good external backlinks or heavy search engine traffic. The rest of them I would rather see return a 404. Internal backlinks don't matter as those links are being changes on the page anyway.

This approach has been quite successful to date, and where I've used it there has been no dreaded dip in traffic when the rewritten url structure was launched.

[bpcombs]

In a search engine's point of view, the authoritative designation of what indicates a page is the URL. So, if you change the URL structure, Google sees these as new pages with a PageRank of zero.

[stakaman]

You need to urgently 301 redirect all the old pages to the new ones. Try to select the appropriate pages to redirect to.